John Baldessari American, 1931-2020

A pioneering force in Conceptual art, John Baldessari transformed pop cultural and art historical iconography into meditations on image, language, appropriation, and authenticity. He worked in a variety of media including sculpture, printmaking, photography, painting, film, performance, installation, and books. Text frequently appears throughout Baldessari’s oeuvre. The artist often concealed faces in found photographs with colored dots, a strategy that forces his viewer to look at the images’ contexts, rather than at the particularities of the subjects. Baldessari exhibited widely within his lifetime, showing in cities including New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Zürich, and Berlin. His work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, among others (via Artsy).